Yeah sorry haha, I have a lot to catch up on! I've missed a lot since I last came around!

Seriously though, the new textures, sprites and level designs look like something that came from a team of people you'd pay. SRB2's community keeps surprising me with the amount of love and care that's gone into it throughout the years, by new and old members alike (it's good to see a lot of you guys still around!)

Really though, this is looking neat. My only gripe with slopes, which I've had with them even since stuff like SRB2CB, is that they feel kind of unnecessarily heavy to walk up. Like to get up even a very shallow slope you need to be moving pretty fast, even though the gravity itself is floaty as hell in this game. I guess it probably is actually pretty accurate to the classic games, but I always felt like having weight to a character was handled well in, say, Sonic Adventure 1. It wasn't hard to go up slopes in that game but your character still felt like it had weight to it, if that makes any sense.

Plus in SA1 you could run on the walls and that was neat, not that I think seamless transitions between curve and wall would be easy or even possible in SRB2

Yes we'd need to make a ton of new sprites for sideways gravity to work, no amount of sprite rotation software or in-game sprite rotation etc can fill in all of the missing angles that would be needed. (Not to mention the above unfinished example would just be for THE STANDING, THINK ABOUT THE NUMBER OF SPRITES IN TOTAL FOR EVERY ANIMATION ALTOGETHER)

So yes, sideways gravity is almost certainly never going to happen in SRB2.

Top down sprites would have to be made manually, Though i don't think it's the same case for the rest of frames, Can't you just ... Like, Rotate the existing sprites, There are already many softwares that allow you to easily rotate images :

That only works for the sprites where you're still viewing the player directly from the side, Romio. The issue is all the NEW sprites that have to be made.

Even if you just had Sonic tilted 90 degrees while only able to face forwards or backwards, and assuming we coded in rotating the other sprites by 90 (that wouldn't be impossible at least), that's at least 6 extra sprites to make: 2 top-view diagonals, 2 bottom-view diagonals, and directly below/above. Now considering there's usually something like 33 frames per-character that have angles, that's 6*33, or 198 extra sprites to make for a character total.

When you're going crazy and allowing to face any angle vertically though like in my example image, you may as well give up with spriting a character and just make MD2s instead. Because now that's at least 12 extra sprites to make per frame (5 top-down, 5 bottom down, directly above and directly below, if you're going by my example image), so 396 extra sprites. That's beyond the average spriter's patience most likely for a decently sprited character. =V